Folk dancers and singers were out in force together with a wide variety of creative stallholders and vendors, and everywhere we saw bright coloured clothes and gypsy-style skirts and hats decorated with flowers.

In common with many others I love to watch to listen to folk songs and watch folk dancing; it strengthens our sense of community and connects us with our traditions and our agrarian culture of centuries ago.

Mummers (photo credit Abigail Robinson)

There is always a tendency to idealize life in Britain before the industrial revolution, when those in the country villages practised all sorts of traditional customs, many related to our superstitious beliefs of the past.

And yet folk memory is strong within us, and it can never be eradicated. It reappears in so many ways in our contemporary lives; in lingering folk religion and folklore, in our language, and in our actions, whether conscious or unconscious.

I love to watch the mummers and the morris dancers, and to see their eccentric costumes and the vigorous, energetic dances.

dancers at the Warwick Folk Festival (photo credit Abigail Robinson)

This is a part of English society that we can well celebrate, long into the future.

Last night I watched the final live Monty Python show broadcast from the O2 arena and delighted once again in those famous sketches, performed by the original Pythons, less of course, Graham Chapman.

I recalled one night at university when I sat on a bed with a group of fellow-students, and one got hold of my copy of Monty Python’s Big Red Book. He then read the book aloud to us, word by word, for the next several hours, and we spent most of the night laughing hysterically.

Monty Pythons Big Red Book Cover

In fact I believe the Python humour translates to the printed page even better than to TV. That event is probably why certain images and phrases remain in my mind, like the address Behind the Hot Water Pipes, Third Washroom Along, Victoria Station; and why I remember the Whizzo Speed chocolate assortment, and Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, (who I have occasionally wished I could put into a novel but realised it would be plagiarism), and also Miss Gloria Pules, who when interviewed about the Piranha Brothers, said they were wont to introduce one to eminent celebrities.

At the 02 Arena, the Dead Parrot Sketch and the Argument sketch were to my mind as good as the originals. The Spanish Inquisition sketch didn’t have, for me, quite the same impact when the comfy chair was threatened. And a bit was missing out of Postal Blackmail.

Nevertheless it was wonderful to see Eric Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam on stage acting the classic sketches.

Monty Python has infused everything each has done subsequently. I have followed and enjoyed their creative work over the years, and loved them because they were Pythons; I’ve watched the films and the TV programmes, read the books, listened to the songs. I queued up outside Waterstone’s in Kensington High Street, London, to buy a copy of Terry Jones’s Fairy Talesand have it signed by the author and illustrator.

In all they have done, the Pythonesque secret language has been there somewhere, that anarchic, surreal element, the parody of a parody of our British society, that we, embedded in that society, all innately recognise and understand, to such an extent that it can be instantly recalled with the words: This is an ex-parrot or Is this the right room for an argument? or Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

I was also thrilled to discover that John Cleese, like myself, loves Roget’s Thesaurus; which played a large part in creating the most memorable lines in the Dead Parrot sketch.

Do you too love the Pythons? do share what the Pythons mean to you, by commenting on this post!

Recently I came upon an article in The Psychotherapistmagazine which highlights the close parallels between the novel and the process of psychotherapy.

In her article Psychotherapy and the Novel, in issue 56 Spring 2014 edition, the author (therapeutic counsellor Rosamond Williams) makes the point that only the novel (of all the narrative art forms) offers a parallel detail to the process of psychotherapy, in the exploration of relationships, thoughts and feelings.

Rosamond Williams cites as examples the following novels: Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Dickens David Copperfield, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, as well as Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

In all of these we can trace the hero or heroine’s learning curve through their confusions and unsatisfactory relationship to resolution: a very therapeutic experience for the reader as well as for the main protagonist.

I can bear out everything she says not only in my reading, but in my own novel-writing.

In Jane Austen’s Price and Prejudice for example, I believe there are many other universal truths, equally valid for our own lives in 2014 just as they were in Regency England, that we can learn, well beyond the ironic and flippant one in the first line: that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.

Here’s just a small selection of the truths, helpful for a therapeutic journey, that I’ve picked out from Pride and Prejudice:

1) even the most outrageous person, behaving badly, can end up getting what he or she wants;

2) no matter how mortifying and objectionable, that person can still be playing a vital part in the chain of events leading to a final positive outcome;

3) when you’re at your saddest and most disappointed, convinced you’ve lost all your hopes and dreams, you don’t know what is going on behind the scenes;

4) when all seems lost, help can sometimes come from the most unexpected quarter;

5) sometimes people do the most disgraceful things and end up triumphing through it, because of the links and connections they’ve unwittingly set up between other people;

and

6) sometimes you can, through your own wrong-headedness and flawed attitude, interfere to try and stop a certain event happening, and end up being the vital factor that facilitates it.

I can identify, too, with the psychotherapeutic journey in my own fiction-writing. In my upcoming novel A Passionate Spirit, my heroine, Zoe, sees her situation as perfect and ideal; when negative influences start to creep in, she denies them; through her stubbornness she continues her denial until she is goaded by a friend with a totally different outlook on life to recognise the threat for what it is. Only when the antagonism has become too great for her to ignore, she makes a critical choice to take responsibility and act to oppose the menace which is engulfing her life.

To me this closely parallels the journey one may take in psychotherapy.

Neil Gaiman in The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains at the Carnegi Hall June 2014

This production was originally commissioned by Sydney Opera House for its Graphic Festival and we saw the first of two nights at the Barbican to be followed by one night at Usher Hall in Edinburgh.

Having read and loved Neil Gaiman’s novels Coraline and The Graveyard Book I was looking forward to seeing this with my two teenage children. From his books and his tweets, I expected Neil Gaiman to be more zappy and over-the-top in person; but he isn’t; he’s gentle and laidback and low-key in his manner, with a self-deprecating humour.

Surely this is the best persona for him to adopt as he tells his tales. Anyone who knows his work expects a playfully dark twist. And this was fully realized in his novelette The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. In this he has chosen to create a Scottish tale, a grim and sombre story of revenge, written with a poetic quality appropriate for a tale from the Outer Hebrides set at the time of the Jacobite rebellion.

It was accompanied by big-screen projections of the illustrations by Eddie Campbell which were astonishingly vivid and real, by turns haunting, harsh and beautiful, conveying the atmosphere of the terrain and the ever-darker direction of the story. We were held captivated throughout Neil Gaiman’s narration; the musicians accompanied the tale with such emotional intelligence and imagination, it was an outstanding display of creative genius.

The story of the dwarf who goes searching for the cave of gold, accompanied by the mysterious tall “border reaver”, has played on my mind ever since, as I considered the rhythm and poetry of it, the elements of darkness and horror, and the moral lesson that lay behind it.